France best selling albums ever:
Come Away With Me by Norah Jones (2002)

Released in late February 26 2002, Come Away With Me was just one more anonymous album released by one more an anonymous artist, Norah Jones. Entering the album chart at #143, it was still one of the rare countries where it debuted right from its release.

If the start of the album was slow, so was its climb towards the chart. The Jazz/Soul set needed 11 weeks to break the Top 50, 20 weeks to enter the Top 10 for the first time, a mere 62 weeks until reaching the Top 5, before finally hitting the top on its 70 weeks. Slow climb to the top for sure, fact is, it still climbed to #1, which is hardly a bad result. Even less shabby is how Come Away With Me remained 11 weeks as the bestseller, during the entire 2003 summer.

By its 106 week, the album got excluded from charts despite being ranked #15 at that time – the highest position ever of an album reaching the old 2-year limit. The album was #20 of the year in 2002, #2 in 2003 and #16 in 2004, one of the very few albums that managed three years in a row inside the Top 20.

Sales-wise, it sold an estimated 320,000 copies in 2002. While sales in following years could have been debatable, I got all its sales from 2003 to the end of 2008 as per GFK. Various figures refer to various EAN codes: 407,844 + 376,115 + 310,291 + 49,020 + 4,920 + 2,789 + 2CD box: 16,947 ; A total of 1,167,926 copies sold during that six years span.

The album continued selling nicely as a deep catalog record since then.

• 2002: 320,000
• 2003-2008: 1,168,000
• 2009-2015: 85,000
• 2009-2015 boxes: 10,000

A grand total of 1,583,000 copies sold at retail.

Net shipment as of the end of 2015 is estimated at 1,590,000 copies. This remains as of today the bestselling debut album of all-time by a foreign artist.